ASBURY, Herbert.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.
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First Edition of The Gangs of New York; Signed and Dated by Herbert Asbury in the Year of Publication
First edition of Herbert Asbury’s colorful history of the New York underworld, the basis for Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. Octavo, original cloth-backed pictorial boards with gilt titles to the spine, top stain red and illustrated throughout. Boldly signed and dated by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “Herbert Asbury Mount Sinai Hosp. April 26, 1928.” In very good condition with wear to the front and back inner hinge.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928) is Herbert Asbury’s vivid chronicle of the street gangs, saloons, and political machines of nineteenth-century Manhattan, from the Five Points and the Bowery to the Draft Riots of 1863, with its Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys and the Tammany politicians who made use of them. Asbury was an American journalist and author, a descendant of Francis Asbury, the pioneering first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, and he went on to write similar histories of the underworlds of San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago. His book reached a new audience as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), which received ten nominations at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture.